Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 PC Optimization: Best Settings for Performance

Spider-Man 2 is out on PC, and although it’s a broken mess, the performance is relatively decent. The game constantly crashes regardless of the graphics settings and configuration. As you wait for a patch, here’s our optimization guide detailing the performance and visual implications of various settings. Spider-Man 2 features ray-traced lighting, upscaling, and frame generation, including DLSS 4. We tested the game in the sandstorm following Sandman’s siege on New York.

Windows/System Settings to Optimize

• Enable Resizable BAR.
• Turn on Game Mode.
• Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
• Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
• Disable Memory Integrity. Windows Menu->VBS->Device Security.
• Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
• Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
• Here’s a guide with more detailed instructions.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2: PC System Requirements

---

Spider-Man 2: Graphics & Resolution Scaling

Spider-Man 2 is relatively taxing, averaging just 80 FPS on the GeForce RTX 5090 at 4K, 121 FPS at 1440p, and 133 FPS at 1080p with all the graphics settings (except ray tracing) maxed out. FHD shows signs of a CPU bottleneck which we’ll analyze near the end.

With ray tracing enabled, the averages drop below 50 FPS at 4K with 1440p posting 71 FPS and 1080p at 81 FPS. Once again, the latter appears to be facing a CPU bottleneck which makes sense as the BVH construction is performed on the CPU rather than the GPU.

Test Setup

• CPU: Intel Core i9-12900K @ 5.3 GHz.
• Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420.
• GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE.
• Motherboard: MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI.
• Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.

The performance scaling across the five graphics presets ranges between 40% and 45%, with the maximum quality settings slightly lowering the average further.

The very high quality mode renders superior ambient shadows. Dropping from the high to the medium-quality preset reduces geometric detail and distant shadow quality. Switching to low further reduces the shadow and geometric detail, and disables reflections. The lowest preset disables shadows and leaves little in the way of distant geometry.

Ray Tracing: Shadows, Reflections & Ambient Occlusion

Spider-Man 2 features ray-traced reflections, shadows, and ambient occlusion. As usual, ray tracing is quite taxing, reducing the average framerates by nearly 40% at the highest quality. You can reduce the BVH structure detail if only ray-traced reflections are enabled. This is useful in CPU-bound scenarios.

Geometric Detail is automatically set to very high quality if ray-traced ambient occlusion or shadows are enabled. I suspect lower polygon versions adversely affect the shadow quality. Either way, reducing the RT geometric detail improves the performance by 7-8%.

Enabling any ray-traced setting tanks the game’s performance by at least 20%. Beyond that, you lose another 5-10% more FPS depending on the quality and number of effects enabled.

Object Range sets the distance (from the player) within which objects are considered for ray tracing. In other words, it sets the maximum distance rays can travel after being launched from the viewport/camera. It trivially impacts performance but can reduce visual fidelity by disabling ray-traced shadows and ambient occlusion for intermediate-distant objects.

DLSS Ray Reconstruction: NVIDIA RTX 4090 vs. RTX 5090

DLSS Ray Reconstruction acts as more than just a denoiser in Spider-Man 2. It retains much of the ray traced shadow and ambient occlusion detail otherwise lost due to the low ray counts. By default, the game uses NVIDIA’s Real-Time Denoising which reduces noise by sampling pixels spatially and temporally. However, it’s not built to identify different ray-traced patterns like reflections and shadows.

RT Reflections are blurry around the edges and fail to retain thin geometry like railings, vegetation, and complex lighting data. Ray reconstruction eliminates the noise and produces more detailed reflections with finer color patterns.

RT Shadows are considerably more detailed with ray reconstruction, retaining more of the casting geometry detail. Like reflections, many finer shadows that are otherwise missed are retained. RTAO also loses much of its detail without reconstruction almost to the point of being redundant.

Ray Reconstruction reduces performance by 5-10% on RTX 40/50 series GPUs. Strangely, unlike the RTX 5090, the newer transformer model is almost as fast as the legacy CNN model on the RTX 4090.

Shadows & Reflections (Rasterized)

• Screen Space Ambient Occlusion or SSAO is the most popular ambient occlusion algorithm. It uses screen space data from the depth buffer to calculate the occlusion around each pixel.
• Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion or HBAO+ considers the horizon angle around each pixel to calculate the occlusion from different directions. It’s much more accurate with vegetation and thin geometry.
• Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion or GTAO, similar to HBAO+, upgrades SSAO with a horizon-based approach but is supposed to be faster with better coverage for thin objects and surface edges.

Screen Space Reflections are used to render low-resolution reflections on specular surfaces. They’re mainly cast on water bodies and metallic/glass surfaces but are much less detailed than their ray-traced counterparts. The performance hit is negligible.

LOD, Traffic & Crowd Density

Crowd Density sets the number of NPCs roaming the city streets. It reduces framerates by 6-7% at the highest quality setting. We don’t recommend dropping below high.

Traffic Density adjusts the number of vehicles traversing the roads. It merely sets the gap between any two vehicles. Moreover, it barely impacts performance. Leave it at the highest value.

Hair & Weather Particle Quality

Hair Quality sets the detail of hair textures. Unfortunately, the visual difference between the highest and lowest quality is imperceptible. Framerates see a mild 2-4% drop at the highest option.

Weather Particle Quality defines particle resolution. Higher quality options render denser dust clouds, embers, and particulate matter. The lowest quality almost completely disables dust clouds. The performance is largely unaffected.

Upscaling & Frame Generation

Spider-Man 2 features NVIDIA DLSS 4, AMD FSR 3.1, and Intel XeSS 2 upscaling filters. Despite recent reports, DLSS 4 is the fastest on GeForce GPUs. It improves performance by over 40% and 60% at quality and performance modes, respectively.

Frame Generation improves the average framerates by up to 90% at 4K maximum quality settings. DLSS 4-based frame generation is about as fast as FSR 3 but uses slightly more VRAM (+100-150 MB).

Spider-Man 2: VRAM Usage & Texture Quality

Spider-Man 2 uses up to 15 GB of graphics memory at 4K maximum quality settings. Disabling ray tracing brings it down to 13 GB while reducing the resolution to 1080p further drops it to 10 GB. QHD or 1440p requires 13 GB for ray tracing and a bit over 11 GB for mere rasterization.

Reducing the graphics settings (at 4K) decreases the VRAM usage to 12 GB at “Very High,” 11 GB at “High,” and 10 GB at “Medium” and below.

Texture filtering and other excluded settings like field of view, bloom, and blur effects don’t impact performance by a notable degree.

Spider-Man 2: CPU Bottlenecks

Spider-Man 2 is mildly CPU-bound on older processors. We recorded a GPU-Busy deviation of 14% at 1080p with ray tracing and 12% without it. QHD/1440p and 4K were completely GPU-bound across all scenarios tested.

Spider-Man 2 Performance Summary

Most users should be able to run Spider-Man 2 without rasterization, at least with upscaling. Ray tracing will require frame generation, and DLSS ray reconstruction for the best results. Luckily combining upscaling and frame generation should be sufficient to run the game at maximum settings on most RTX 30 and RTX 40 series GPUs at the resolutions recommended at the end:

• Radeon gamers might want to disable ray tracing for the best performance.
• Lower-end RTX players should consider disabling ray reconstruction for a playable experience with ray tracing enabled.
• The below-chart highlights the performance impact of enabling individual RT settings:

Spider-Man 2: Optimized Settings for PC

Graphics Options	High-end	Midrange	Low-end
Resolution	4K (3840 x 2160)	1440p (2560 x 1440)	1080p (1920 x 1080)
FPS Target	60 FPS+	60 FPS	60 FPS
Texture Quality	Very High	Very High	High (Very High for 12 GB)
Texture Filtering	16x AF	16x AF	16x AF
Ray Traced Reflections	Very High	High	Off
Ray Traced Shadows	Very High	Very High	Off
Ray Traced AO	Very High	High	Off
Reflection Geometry	Very High	Very High	Off
Object Range	10	10	Off
DLSS Ray Reconstruction	Transformer	Transformer	Off
Shadows	Ultra	Ultra	Ultra
Ambient Occlusion	–	–	GTAO
Screen Space Reflections	High	High	High
LOD	Ultra	Ultra	Ultra
Traffic Density	Very High	Very High	Very High
Crowd Density	Ultra	Ultra	Ultra
Hair Quality	Very High	Very High	Very High
Weather Particle Quality	Very High	Very High	Very High
FOV	+25	+25	+25
Upscaling (DLSS/FSR)	Performance	Performance	Balanced
Frame Generation	On	On	Off

	High-end (4K)	Mid-range (1440p)	Low-end (1080p)
CPU	Core i7-13700K|Ryzen 7 7700X	Core i5-12600K|Ryzen 5 7600	Core i5-12400 AMD Ryzen 5 3600
GPU	GeForce RTX 4090	GeForce RTX 4070 Super	RTX 3060|RTX 4060
Memory	32GB (dual-channel)	16GB (dual-channel)	Less than: 16GB (dual-channel)

---

Graphics Options	RTX 4090	RTX 4080 Super	RTX 4070 Ti	RTX 4070 Super	RTX 4070
Resolution	4K (3840 x 2160)	4K (3840 x 2160)	1440p (2560 x 1440)	1440p (2560 x 1440)	1440p (2560 x 1440)
FPS Target	60 FPS	~60 FPS	60 FPS	60 FPS	60 FPS
Texture Quality	Very High	Very High	Very High	Very High	Very High
Texture Filtering	16x AF	16x AF	16x AF	16x AF	16x AF
Ray Traced Reflections	Very High	High	Very High	Very High	Very High
RT Interiors	Very High	Off	Very High	Very High	Very High
Ray Traced Shadows	Very High	Off	Very High	Very High	Very High
Ray Traced AO	Very High	Off	Very High	Very High	Very High
Reflection Geometry	Very High	High	Very High	Very High	Very High
Object Range	10	6	10	6	6
DLSS Ray Reconstruction	Transformer	Off	Transformer	Transformer	CNN
Shadows	Ultra	Ultra	Ultra	Ultra	Ultra
Ambient Occlusion	–	SSAO	–	–	–
Screen Space Reflections	High	High	High	High	High
LOD	Ultra	Very High/High	Ultra	Ultra	Very High
Traffic Density	Very High	Very High	Very High	Very High	Very High
Crowd Density	Ultra	High	Ultra	Ultra	High
Hair Quality	Very High	Very High	Very High	Very High	Very High
Weather Particle Quality	Very High	Very High	Very High	Very High	Very High
FOV	+25	+25	+25	+25	+25
Upscaling (DLSS/FSR)	Performance	Performance	Balanced	Performance	Performance
Frame Generation	On	On	On	On	On

Spider-Man 2: Best Settings for Low-end PC

Spider-Man 2 requires frame generation for 60 FPS and above regardless of your resolution. Sure, you can reduce the graphics settings to medium or low and enable performance mode upscaling, but that won’t produce the best visuals. Fortunately, this game features FSR 3.1-based frame generation which works on every graphics card. Here’s our add-on guide for budget and low-end PCs.

Graphics Options	RTX 3060 12 GB	RTX 3060 Ti	RTX 4060
Resolution	1080p (1920 x 1080)	1080p (1920 x 1080)	1080p (1920 x 1080)
FPS Target	60 FPS	60 FPS	60 FPS
Texture Quality	Very High	High	High
Texture Filtering	16x AF	16x AF	16x AF
Ray Traced Reflections	Very High	Very High	Very High
RT Interiors	Off	Off	Off
Ray Traced Shadows	Off	Off	Off
Ray Traced AO	Off	Off	Off
Reflection Geometry	High	Very High	Very High
Object Range	6	6	6
DLSS Ray Reconstruction	Off	CNN	Transformer
Shadows	Ultra	Ultra	Ultra
Ambient Occlusion	HBAO+	GTAO	GTAO
Screen Space Reflections	High	High	High
LOD	Ultra	Ultra	Ultra
Traffic Density	Very High	Very High	Very High
Crowd Density	High	Ultra	High
Hair Quality	Very High	Very High	Very High
Weather Particle Quality	Very High	Very High	Very High
FOV	+25	+25	+25
Upscaling (DLSS/FSR)	Balanced	Balanced	Balanced
Frame Generation	On	On	Off